The Better Angels of Our Nature
by Trogdor19
Summary: Elena's still human and she and Damon are finally together. But how will they deal with the complications of his vampire nature? He likes to kill and use compulsion to drink from people, and she thinks it is wrong. Can she learn to accept him for who he is, or will he have to change to keep her love? Sequel to "Inevitable" but can be read as a stand-alone.
1. Bree

_Author's Note: This is a sequel to my story "Inevitable," set one year after the end of that story. It departed from canon mid-season three, and the main differences are that Elena is human, she picked Damon, Stefan is going around to different meditation retreats and monasteries to try and learn how to live with his blood addiction, but is awkwardly friends with Elena and Damon, Klaus is dead, Ric is not dead. Oh, and Elena once stabbed Klaus through the eyeball with a hypodermic of vervain._

_When I was writing "Inevitable," I just kept struggling with how Damon and Elena would actually solve some of the issues facing their relationship and I wasn't satisfied with the "love conquers all" platitude._

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**ELENA POV**

"I picked up a new charger for your phone, since we can't find your old one. I left it in my room, for now," I tell Damon.

"Gee thanks, Mrs. Cleaver," Damon mocks. He's cooking dinner. I'm sipping red wine and keeping him company, our usual arrangement.

I roll my eyes and throw an apple at him, and he catches it without even breaking rhythm with the vegetables he's chopping. "You're welcome."

He smirks. "Sometimes I'm just waiting for your dad's ghost to come try and skewer me with a fire poker for playing house with his cheerleading little honor student of a daughter." He waves his chef's knife at the décor. "Especially when I'm in this masterpiece of Pottery Barn suburbia."

"I quit cheerleading. On your advice, actually," I point out. "And my biological father already tried to kill you.

"John?" Damon sneers. "Yeah, meeting him put me down firmly in the 'nurture' column of the genetic debate."

I have to smile at that. He's right, though. Looking over our past, it's hard to believe we ever made it through to the relatively uneventful domestic bliss of the past year. There have been only a handful of hostile vampire and werewolf incidents, and nothing is ever that boring with Damon around, but still. It is weird to think about how different things used to be.

I'd never say this to him, but the last year softened a lot of Damon's sharper edges. He is still bitingly sarcastic, and does exactly as he pleases no matter what anybody else thinks. But the outbursts of chaotic unpredictability appear to be gone for good. It seems like a lifetime ago that I thought I couldn't trust him.

"You remember when you kidnapped me to Georgia?" I lean my elbows on the counter and smile up at Damon.

"I got you drunk and then you beat me at pool _and_ speed shots." He shakes his head. "Humiliating."

" And that bartender, Bree, thought we were dating and told me you were good in the sack," I wiggle my eyebrows at him. "Boy, was she right."

"She also said I was a 'walk away Joe,'" he drawls, slicing bell pepper with smooth efficiency.

I frown. "She wasn't right about that part. You just weren't that serious with her. Once you care about somebody, you don't even know how to stop."

"Steal my leather jacket again and we'll be testing that theory," he warns.

"It smells like you," I say, pressing my lips together into just a hint of a pout.

"Looking cute is not going to work," he says without looking up.

"It works for you," I flirt, trying to distract him just to see if I can.

I can. He puts down the knife and comes around the kitchen island.

"That's because I'm shameless about how I use my looks," he informs me, demonstrating the point by dropping his eyelids to half-mast in the way that makes my brain head straight for the bedroom. Usually followed promptly by my body.

Damon lounges back against the counter, taking me by the hips and pulling me over to him. "Let's compromise."

He dips his head and kisses me with his usual lazy thoroughness until I'm short of breath and I can't remember what we were going to compromise about.

"_I _smell like me. Wear me instead."

"I love to compromise," I breathe against his mouth.

It takes a while before he gets back to making dinner.

Once he does, I take a sip of wine and look away from him, waiting for my pulse to calm down. I kind of want to jump him, but I'm hungry. If I stop watching him so closely, I might make it until after we eat. Maybe.

I try to remember what we were talking about so I won't think about his body.

Ah, our first roadtrip. My brain flashes a memory of me sitting next to Damon, watching him eat French fries in a way that was both playful and sexier than eating should ever be. I smile. "You were being so sweet to me that day in Georgia, and I didn't trust anything about you."

He scoffs. "You made me promise not to use compulsion on you. As if you would know if I did."

"You didn't."

"I didn't have to. Senor Cuervo took care of all your inhibitions for me."

"Was that the first time you saved my life?" I muse, then frown. "That's terrible of me. I should remember."

"It was the first time you saved mine." He gives me one of his mockingly arrogant smiles. "Even though you didn't like me yet."

"I remember. We should go back there sometime, visit Bree. I bet she'd buy me a beer for getting you to stick around this long," I tease.

His eyes slide sideways off of mine.

"What? I'm sure she's not still mad at you for ditching her. She seemed like she was pretty much over it the last time we saw her, anyway."

"Stefan mailed me a little Buddha statue. You'd think after 146 years, he'd know I don't have a fucking knick knack shelf," he complains, changing the subject.

"Damon, what's wrong? Did something happen to Bree?" As soon as I say it I know what happened to Bree.

He doesn't deny it. I'll give him credit. He never lies about anything he's done. Unfortunately that is frequently because he is not sorry for having done it.

"Damon, why?" I whisper. "With me out in the car?"

His mouth turns down slightly in a way that tells me he is sorry: sorry that I found out.

"She called that guy and told him I was there. He was going to kill me." Damon shrugs. "I don't blame him. I did stake his girl. That's fair. But Bree shouldn't have gotten involved. She deliberately stalled me there so that guy could get his gas can all filled up before he came over."

I pull a bar stool out and sit down. "I liked Bree."

I can't really process this new revelation. Damon is so different now, more cheerful, less dark. It's hard to remember how volatile he used to be. Well, I mean he's still volatile, but when he's upset he doesn't _kill_ people.

"You didn't have to kill her. I talked that guy into sparing you."

"I do a lot of things I don't _have_ to do, Elena."

He drops bell peppers into a pan with just a drizzle of olive oil, as if we aren't talking about him murdering his ex-lover.

"Besides, I could have taken that guy. I was just stalling until my femur healed enough that I could stand. If you stay down and groan for a minute or two, people usually slip up and you get an easy shot at them. Remember that. You could play it off pretty well sometime with those big brown eyes."

He starts peeling an onion.

"Damon, you can't _kill _people whenever you want to, just because they made you angry."

"Actually, I _can_ and I did, but I haven't done it lately, so can we drop it?" His face is moving through too many expressions in succession, each one sarcastic or mocking. He gets twitchy when he's challenged or when he knows I'm mad at him.

It's a fine line. I know if I push too hard, he'll do exactly the thing I don't want him to. It's really frustrating, and it was Bonnie who finally clued me in that it was his way of testing my love. Thank God it hasn't happened in a really big way since we started dating. Not in a murder way, anyway.

I know it's in the past, but my gut tells me that the past can easily become the present. Damon still doesn't see anything wrong with knocking off a person here or there if he feels like it. He just hasn't been in the mood lately, I guess.

There's a lump in my throat because I can remember Bree's face, how tall she was. How nice and attentive Damon was to me that day. I wonder how he killed her, and decide I really don't want to know.

My fingers are twisting together anxiously. Damon's still cooking as if this is a normal weeknight. Killing Bree was wrong, but how can I be true to my beliefs without making this into a huge fight that I'm not sure I can win? How can I love him if he just…kills people?

"You don't think that's wrong?" I venture.

Damon sighs very heavily. "Could you just call the Monk and get him to lecture me for you? Please?"

"I'm not trying to lecture, Damon. I'm trying to understand," I say, ignoring his new nickname for Stefan, even though I'm not fond of it.

"I do things that I decide I want to do," he tells me brusquely. "Sometimes I choose a little too quickly, but overall, I do what I decide to do. If that's the same as how you decide what the 'right' thing to do is, then no, I don't think killing Bree was wrong. Yeah, we had a history. Yeah, she shot that dog when she chose to become an accessory to my murder."

He eyes the skillet and looks mildly disappointed. "You're not going to be hungry, now, are you?"

"Haven't you killed other people, though?" My voice is smaller than I want it to be. "People that didn't try to kill you?"

Damon props his forearms on the counter and leans down to my eye level, looking at me for the first time since I brought this up.

"Elena, do you really want to do this? I've been alive a long, long time. For a lot of that time, I didn't let myself feel too much. I was in mourning for Katherine for _way _longer than that bitch deserved. I did a lot of things. Probably you don't want to know about most of them."

"I just-," my eyebrows draw down in consternation. "I love everything about you. I like learning new little corners of you because that is just more that I know about you, more I love about who you are. I have a hard time figuring out where _that_ fits into the rest of you. How I can love that part."

I see the doubt flash through his eyes, chased by hurt, and then his eyes go cold. Shoot, that didn't come out right.

"Maybe it doesn't fit," Damon says roughly. "I'm not a puzzle, Elena, I'm a person. I just _am,_ whether or not that makes sense to you. Some parts don't necessarily agree with other parts. If that was required, Stefan would…well, Stefan would just spontaneously combust because he couldn't exist with the laws of nature."

He gestures at me.

"You're no better. Well, you're better, but your parts are mismatched too. You're as gentle as a lamb, but I know for a fact you shotgunned-whipped a dude, you stabbed Ric in the chest, you daggered Rebekah. We won't even talk about what you did to Klaus." He nods once. "Although it was really cool."

"I get that. People aren't totally consistent," I concede.

I consider what I want to say next. This one's risky, but it might make my point. I feel a flutter in my throat before I say it, because if I'm wrong I am _really _going to regret asking. But no, I know Damon. I do. That's why the murder thing throws me off. I know he did it, he admits to doing it, but it doesn't fully make sense to me why even now he doesn't see that it is wrong.

"Have you ever raped anyone?" I ask.

His head jerks back as if I'd slapped him and his eyes flare with anger. "Jesus, Elena! What the _fuck_?"

I feel bad for saying it, but I'm relieved at his reaction. I do know him, know what lives at the core of him behind the callous façade, beneath the impulsiveness.

"Have you?" I say, standing my ground now that I know I can make my point.

"No," he spits it at me. He turns on his heel and walks out. "Fuck this. I don't need this."

He makes it halfway across the living room before he stops. "No. No!"

I stand up, waiting for him to come back.

He stalks right up to me and points his finger in my face. "You. How can _you_ say that to me?"

I grab his hand and squeeze it before I let it go, to remind him that I'm on his side. "I didn't think you had, Damon. I said it to make a point."

"What point?" he asks, incredulous. "What point can you possibly be making by asking me that?"

"Because you hate rape, Damon. It's one of the only things that you consistently think is just plain _wrong. _You say you have no morality, that that stuff doesn't interest you, but you have to admit it. You must have something, or you'd just rape whoever you want. Psychologists say it's about power and domination, after all. You like those things. I've heard you say that the power is what you like about killing. You like the rush of making the choice of whether to take a person out of the equation, out of the world."

"Rape isn't about _power_, it's about being a total dick! Hurting a woman, screwing her head up like that about sex, just because you want some and can't get it?" He shakes his head violently. "Not the same, Elena. Don't try to analyze things you have no understanding of."

"You hurt women when you bite them," I say staunchly. "You hurt them when you kill them. Rape is wrong because you do it to them against their will, but you do all those other things to them against their will. You compel them to let you bite them because you want blood and you can't get it any other way. If they remembered it happened, it would probably mess with their heads, too."

"Gah!" Damon makes an inarticulate sound of frustration, rubbing both of his hands hard in his hair. He points at me again. "You better remember when this is over, that I truly, deeply, did _not _want to explain this shit to you?"

I nod, working really hard to stay calm for him.

He closes his eyes and stretches his neck tightly to one side, then brings it back center. His lips are pressed together in a hard line.

"First, do I hurt you when I bite you?"

I blush. I still found it pretty embarrassing that I liked it when he fed on me.

If he didn't use his blood to close the wounds, I would be mortified about the bite marks I loved for him to leave on me. I didn't want anyone to see them, but I wanted them to be there. If we were staying in for the day alone I would talk him into letting me keep the bites unhealed. It was pretty un-feminist of me, but I liked the claiming of it, the possession.

I clear my throat and try to remember that I'm having an adult discussion about our relationship, because thinking about the bites makes me think about sex, and that's not what we need to be doing right now.

"No. You know you don't hurt me," I re-assure him.

His eyes soften marginally at my reaction.

"It doesn't have to hurt, Elena. It's mostly the adrenaline that makes it scary, but you can be as rough or as gentle about it as you want. I think there's something else, some kind of alchemical reaction to whether or not they want to do it. It seems like the more willing they are to give their blood, the more pleasure they take from it. Maybe that's just self-fulfilling on their part, I don't really know. I know it is better when you have feelings for someone," he says and shrugs, looking away.

"My point is that usually people, women especially, like it when I feed on them. If I am short of time and need to compel them, I do it to take their fear away because then it doesn't hurt. You're right, though. It probably does mess with their heads." He holds out his hands palms up and gives me one of his artificial, surface-only smiles. "Before I moved back here, I seduced women into wanting to share their blood with me, no compulsion necessary. But that takes a lot of time. And I doubt you really want to hear that."

"I'd rather you did that than kill them."

He looks annoyed, but he doesn't leave. Instead he goes and sits down in the living room. I follow him, perching on the arm of the couch. "Any chance you'll let this go?" he asks hopefully.

I shake my head firmly. This has been bothering me for a long time. Since I met him, if I wanted to be honest about it. Even when he first got here, I never really believed he was_ that_ guy, no matter how much he played the part.

Damon pulls at a loose thread on his jeans, frowning. He should frown. Those probably cost more than the couch I'm sitting on. His next words wipe this thought clean out of my mind.

"I killed a fourteen-year-old boy once," he says.

His tone is more thoughtful than usual, so I bite my tongue. Hard. And let him continue.

His long-lashed eyes flicker back up to mine. "In the War Between the States. You were supposed to be sixteen to enlist, but he was way younger than that. People lied about their ages all the time. No driver's licenses. I stabbed him through the chest with my bayonet. I didn't really get a taste for killing as a human," he says without inflection. Like he's telling me I spilled something on my shoe.

"My attitude toward killing didn't really change until I had transitioned and seen a couple generations of humans come and go." He flares his eyes at me sarcastically. "It's not all cocky-vampire-playing-God like you think it is."

I don't answer.

He rolls his eyes and his voice is cruelly mocking, which is how I know this hurts him. "I'm not all 'sociopath' like you think I am either. It's just time. You don't get it. You're _nineteen_."

"I'm pretty sure I understood murder was wrong before I got into junior high, Damon," I say impatiently.

"No, you've got it backwards. It's time passing, Elena. Time, and people, passing. You know, mice are probably cute, when you see the first one. All fuzzy, with floppy widdle ears," he taunts. "But fill the street with them and they're not cute anymore. Have them swarming everywhere and they are just a numerical, faceless nuisance. You don't want to hear this, but humans are the same way. I've known a LOT of humans. A lot. The ones that are interesting or special are pretty few and far between." He looks at me with slightly narrowed eyes.

It's rare that I feel our age difference. Usually, I feel like I'm the older one, but Damon's face looks his age right now. Without the wrinkles, anyway.

"You just think they're each unique and special little individuals because you haven't known that many. Wait a while. You'll meet somebody who reminds you of Bonnie. Then another. And another. After a while everybody you meet will seem like lesser versions of people you used to know."

He smirks half-heartedly. "Imagine Caroline Lite. Yikes. Of course, then the imitations of the people you used to know die, and their imitations die and it gets pretty hard to give a enough of a shit to try to learn their names anymore."

I shiver. This is the first time I've felt a pang of maybe wanting to be a vampire. I didn't want to fade into namelessness like all those people. Fade out of Damon's memory, especially. I don't like the idea of him going on unchanged after my death.

He gets up and pours himself a drink, having re-created his tray of decanters at my house. I bought him one with a fancy scrollworked "D" on it, and that's the one he keeps his favorite bourbon in. That's the one he goes for now, along with one of the clean glasses he keeps on the tray next to the decanters. He comes back to sit next to me on the couch.

"People are mostly unjustifiably in love with themselves and a few other traits in various combinations. That's part of why I was so depressed when the whole Katherine thing didn't pan out." He tips his glass at me. "I'd seen enough to know that the odds were good, but the goods were odd. And say what you will about Katherine, she isn't boring."

I sincerely hate how much what he's saying makes sense.

"But you still don't have the right to kill people, even if you think they aren't unique or interesting," I say, trying to salvage my argument.

"They die so I can live," Damon says wearily. "World without end, that is nature, Elena. Like it or hate it, watch the Discovery Channel. That's the way it is."

"That's not right. Not necessary."

"Oh yeah?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. "You eat meat. If you got to know each and every cow, made friends with them, you'd probably like them enough you wouldn't want them to die. But you don't get to know the cow. You just keep going to the grocery store." He takes a drink of bourbon and holds it on his tongue.

"You know what sucks, Damon?"

"This conversation?"

"Yeah, actually. Because you have a point. I really get your argument. And I'm not convinced. I still think it's wrong."

He slams down his glass and jolts to his feet. I try not to flinch away, but it's hard.

When he lets his bottomless intensity out through his eyes it feels like they can burn through you like a blowtorch through thin paper. Whether it is love or anger, he's got more of it than he can hold.

"Why don't you just say it, Elena? Why don't you say what you really mean?" His face is right in mine and I am giving way before him, leaning back from the onslaught.

"What?"

"_I'm_ wrong. _I _am what you think is immoral, fucked up. That's what you've always thought."

He straightens and sneers down at me with a distance in his face that I haven't seen in a long time. "I thought when you chose to be with me instead of Stefan that you'd started to change your mind a little bit, but you didn't, did you? You were just slumming it."

His eyes flare dangerously and he sweeps a hand down, roughly indicating his body. "I hope you enjoyed being naughty and playing with the bad boy, Elena." He takes a step back. "Cause you've gotten everything you're going to get from me. I'm done with this shit."

Two strides.

Two strides is the difference between him being in my life and being out of it, the door slamming so hard that I'm surprised it doesn't crack the frame of the house apart.

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_Author's Note: Please leave me a note and let me know what you thought of the chapter- sorry it ended so dark, but I didn't feel right about rushing the resolution. They need to find a way to work through this if they're going to be together, but I will spoiler a little bit and promise a happy ending!_

_For more of my writing, visit my website at michellehazenbooks dot com_

_The website features an exclusive Delena story not posted on this website, a lemony one-shot about Damon and (vampire) Elena sharing a feed. Find that at michellehazenbooks dot com /willing/_

_It also features an exclusive deleted scene to Inevitable called "Devils and Angels and Brothers." Find that at michellehazenbooks dot com /deleted-scene-devils-and-angels-and-brothers/_


	2. Wicked Lovely

_Author's Note: The chapter name is from a book title by Melissa Marr. It seemed like the correct contradiction. This chapter **hurt** to write, but it felt very true. I promise a happy ending…_

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**ELENA POV**

My anger only lasted about an hour. My unequivocal belief that I was right and that morality was absolute lasted until midnight.

I made it to one in the morning on sheer stubbornness, and then I was lost.

By two, I was pulling up in front of the boarding house.

I hadn't brought a flashlight, and I didn't want to turn on any lights, so I felt my way inside in the dark. The door was unlocked, as always. Damon told me once that when he locked it, all the people who came because they wanted to kill him broke windows instead and he got tired of replacing them. I was never sure how serious he was about that.

The boarding house reminds me of Stefan. I spoke to him yesterday on the phone. I've been doing my best to bulldoze through his guilt and anger to be his friend, but it is still awkward. It makes me sad.

I want to find a way we can still be _something _to each other, and maybe if I was a vampire and had a century or two, we could, but Stefan feels everything just as strongly as Damon does. I worry that he doesn't have it in him to accept things and move on from me having chosen Damon. I wouldn't blame him, but it hurts anyway.

Even while I'm missing one brother, my feet are carrying me inevitably toward the other. I can barely see anything, but I know the way. If it weren't for Jeremy, I would have probably moved in here already. My house holds too many bad memories, and I am irrationally fond of Damon's room here; its clean lines and sparse, indulgent furnishings. I knew he likes the boarding house better, too. The big rooms and opulent décor are exactly to his taste, though he never talks about things like that.

The exception is my bed. It is smaller than his, but he loves it so much that I one time, I asked him why. Most guys aren't that fond of floral sheets.

He had propped himself up on one elbow and leered at me. "It's all frilly and feminine. Every time you let me sleep in here, it's like getting into your panties all over again."

I pause outside his door. I hated sleeping without Damon. When we had first gotten together, we were having sex like all the time. It made me feel cheap when he left afterwards, and he didn't put up much of a fight. Any fight, really. And then he was just staying over every night. Sometimes at his house, sometimes at mine, but we were always together. I'd gotten used to the comfort of his presence. I'd almost begun to take it for granted that he would always be there.

I resist the urge to rest my forehead against his door and give into cowardice. Instead, I make myself go inside. It is dark and I don't hear anything, but I can feel that he is here. That alone is enough to make me shudder with relief. A dark corner of my soul had considered the possibility that he had been angry enough to go and find another girl. To drink from, to fuck, to kill? I had no idea. Maybe all three. To prove to me that he was who he was and no one had the right to ask him to change.

I pulled my shirt off over my head, intending to crawl in next to him. Since he was here, we could probably work this out. He was never, never mad at me in bed.

My hands stalls on the button of my jeans. He could be, this time. He'd been furious. What if he pushed me away? What if he didn't want to bother with me if I was going to be such a pain in the ass, questioning his choices, getting in the way of his lifestyle?

We'd been together for almost a year. Enough for the newness to wear off. Way longer than I figured it usually took him to get his fill of someone, sexually or otherwise.

"That zipper broken?" His lazy voice comes out of the darkness and wraps around me like warm velvet. "I can help you with that."

I nearly break it now in my haste. I pull back the covers and crawl in with him. He pulls me on top of his chest and holds me hard against him, his hands giving lie to the calm of his tone. I shudder, running my hands all over him, memorizing the lines of him as if he's been gone for weeks instead of hours.

He finds my lips in the dark and his kiss pulls at things deep in my stomach, makes my chest open and ache, sooths and feeds the fear that is like a cancer inside of me.

"Damon, _God_ you scared me."

"Why?"

"I thought you were leaving, really leaving."

"You're not that lucky."

I hold onto him so tightly that it should hurt. "Don't even joke about that. Not right now, ok?" I kiss him again.

Heat flares low in my belly. I want to be as close to him as I can get, let the fireworks of our connection drive away my doubts, drive away the poisonous idea of what it would feel like if he left.

When we'd gotten together, I'd told him that I wouldn't ask him to change, but that I couldn't promise I would be able to forgive the things he did. I told him, honestly, that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to _not _forgive him, no matter what the crime. I doubted that he'd understood what I meant.

I kiss his neck and my hand travels lower.

He stops my hand before it gets to his penis and it feels like he's injected liquid nitrogen into my veins.

Damon has _never_ stopped me. Not once refused sex, ever, even right in the middle of a bad fight. I mean, he has every right, of course he does, but he never _has._

"You're still angry with me," I say through uncooperative vocal cords.

"No, I'm not. Well, I am, but not for the reason you think. I just can't do _that_ right now, Elena."

I need to see him.

I roll away and turn on the lamp. His expression makes the fear run rampant in me. It settles at the base of my throat, like a bar pressed just above my collarbone that is slowly choking me.

I don't care if it hurts. I need to see him. Just in case he can't forgive me, I want every second I can to memorize that face, those lips, those shoulders. The exact way his neck transforms into sculpted jawline.

"Are you leaving?" I ask him. I'm braver than I thought.

"No," he says shortly, his hands clasped behind his head.

He must hear that I'm not breathing, because he relents and pulls one arm free to take my hand. I grip it with both of mine, as if I can hold us together with just the inadequate human strength of my hands. This is big. I've opened something really big between us.

That secret, dark part of me wants to know if I would sacrifice Bree now, if I would accept her death without question if it meant I wouldn't have driven this wedge into our relationship. It asks me if she was worth maybe losing him.

_Of course she is, she was a person, _I tell myself fiercely. I push the thought away where I can't examine it too closely. I don't want to know my answer. In this secret corner of my mind, I am a far, far worse person than Damon will ever know. This part of me would have sacrificed Stefan and Elijah to save him when Klaus was torturing him. Would have sacrificed Bonnie and Caroline. I don't let that corner own me. I don't let it be my whole mind.

"What's wrong, Damon? You're scaring me."

"It won't make it better, Elena. Talking about things doesn't always make them better. Lots of times it makes it worse." He won't look at me. "Come on, Bree's been dead for almost two years and look where talking about her got us. Probably some kind of witchy ghost revenge. I fucking _hate_ witches."

"You don't want me to touch you, Damon. There's something really wrong. If we can't just make it disappear, we have to talk about it."

"What's wrong with you?" he asks instead. "When I left, you were all righteous. What happened to you?"

I don't want him to know about me. I don't want to let that possibility into the room, let it free like a virus. But it's sure not going to disappear on its own and this, _this _is the elephant in the room in our relationship. We can't really have a relationship with this between us. I've always known that.

Part of me thought I might get killed before my secret came out and I was perfectly happy to fill all the remaining days of my life with Damon, devouring him like a last meal over and over again.

Instead, he'd killed Klaus and Stefan had left, touring monasteries and meditation retreats all over the world in search of peace. Control. A way to forgive himself. I didn't fool myself into thinking he'd find a way to forgive Damon and I.

My grip tightens on his hand until I would have hurt him if he wasn't a vampire. I close my eyes because I can't look at him when I say this.

"I'm afraid of the things you do," I tell him. "I'm afraid that you will kill and compel and take from people, and it is all _wrong_ and I can't live with that. I'm afraid there isn't a way to make my peace with what you do, with…" I falter, each word harder to spit out than the last, as if the words, in self-preservation, are trying to cram themselves back down my throat before I can ruin my own life with them.

"I'm afraid that there isn't a way to make peace with that part of who you are."

His hand goes slack in mine and I won't open my eyes because I can't _bear _to see his hurt.

"I'm afraid-," my voice chokes down so small that without vampire hearing, he would miss what I say next.

"I'm _afraid_ that I'll forgive you. That instead of leaving you, I'll stay and condone everything you might want to do. I'm afraid I'll sacrifice my principles instead of losing you. I'm afraid that I'll lose myself instead." Tears streak out from beneath my eyelashes.

Stefan would understand. I don't know if Damon gets this part of me, even now. If he grasps that like his brother, my principles are what lives at the core of me. What am I if Damon is more important than that? Who am I if the core of me is another person?

Nothing.

But still, how can I let him go? How can I fool myself into thinking that he could do something that _could _release the hold his love has on me?

I told Bonnie once that I was afraid to choose Damon because what I felt for him was stronger than love. Too strong to manage, to live with on a daily basis. I don't think she believed me, but I was right.

I don't have vampire hearing, so if it hadn't been utterly silent in the boarding house, I would have missed Damon's response. It is so low, it is words spoken without breath.

"Me, too."

My eyes fly open because that is the dead _last_ thing I expect him to say. He's not looking at me. He's still looking at the ceiling, one hand behind his head.

I touch his chest, tentatively. "Damon?"

If we have the same fear, we have to be able to work this out.

He flinches at my touch. "Don't, Elena. You're right. We do need to talk about something."

Fresh tears overwhelm my eyes. "You may not want me to touch you, and we can talk about whatever you want, but I want you to know I love you," I tell him.

Some days it is easier to get Damon to believe this than others. He wants to. He _wants_ to be loved more than anyone I've ever met, but it is so important to him that his impulse is always to pretend the opposite. As if he's hiding something valuable in plain sight so that no one will think to take it from him.

He is still holding my hand. I don't know why he can do this, while rejecting anything else from me.

"I love you so much," I tell him fiercely. "This doesn't change that. This is _because _of that."

"You may want to reserve judgment on that until after I tell you what I did tonight."

Fear should have nothing new to teach me. Not after the last two years. It does though, running through my nervous system like waves of electrical shock, erasing reality the way I know it, threatening to break everything down, take everything from me. What has he done? What if this is what breaks us apart for good? Damon could be gone. Just like that, our whole life together. He could just walk out anytime he wanted.

"I don't want to reserve judgment," I tell him, wishing I could make my words forceful enough that they could batter their way inside his head. "I love you now, and I'm going to love you when you're done telling me." I expect it will hurt, though. I expect it will hurt a lot.

He doesn't react. He doesn't believe me at all. If he doesn't believe I love him, it will be easier for him to walk away.

"I was really pissed off when I left your house and I went straight to a bar, two towns over. I picked out a girl, a blonde." His flat voice is a grenade inside my head, the pin out. Waiting to destroy all the happiness we've found in each other.

"It was a honky-tonk bar. She had a big belt buckle that she won from barrel racing. It had her horse's name on it. Lacey. I don't know her name. Her shirt covered that part."

I realize that under the tonelessness of his words, he is really upset.

I bite my lips, my tongue, and let him make his confession.

"I danced with her once and she was way into me. I didn't even have to compel her to get her to follow me around back. I knew she'd scream once I started feeding, though, so I compelled her not to be afraid, like I usually do. I told her that it was okay to let it feel good." His voice is broken glass grinding over gravel, and there's a hint of pleading in it. He's forcing himself not to look at me, now. I don't know how I can tell the difference, but I can.

"I always do that. Sometimes I like to scare them, let 'em run so I can chase them, catch them, but I don't like to _hurt_ them. I usually compel them at the last minute to calm them back down so the bite doesn't hurt, the blood giving doesn't hurt." He pauses for a minute.

"No, that's not true. Sometimes I have. Sometimes I've wanted to tear their blood out of them, feel how much they fear me, feel how much they _should _fear me. So that's not even right. I guess I have wanted to hurt them, sometimes." He swears, low and mean, like it's for his ears and not mine.

There are so many new kinds of pain inside me, for him, for me, for those poor girls that he's hurt with the same teeth that have been in my neck.

"It's been a while. I'd forgotten," he says, his voice going blank again. "Even then, though, I killed them quickly." His eyes flick to me, then away as if he doesn't dare linger.

"Not like Stefan," he says, sounding careless. "I didn't tear them apart or put them back together. I'd drain them dry or snap their necks, but I didn't torture them. I don't think that's probably worth much to you, but I think maybe it makes a difference."

His brow furrows and I can see him chewing the inside of his mouth. It makes his lower lip push out just slightly, sensually.

His mouth twitches and lines appear around his eyes that look almost cruel.

"I bit her. The girl with the horse named Lacey. I compelled her and I bit her and I tried to drink her blood. The more I drank, the more it _choked_ me." His eyes flew to mine, accusing, the ice blue holding me there as he forced his words on me.

"I saw her in my mind, under me, naked, while I pounded into her. I saw her all limp but wide-eyed. Compelled. Unable to run." He rolls away from me, his knees coming toward his chest and he drops his legs off the bed, fists braced against his thighs. He makes a small choking sound and I realize he's gagging.

"I could barely make myself stay long enough to compel her to forget me," he said. "Ran like a fucking criminal all the way back here and showered until I was half-fish."

I reach for him. "Damon-,"

He knocks my hand away, nostrils flaring as he turns to look at me. "_You_ did this to me, Elena. You always wanted to make me more like Stefan, and you got your wish. Shit, I almost called him when I got back. Can you believe that?" he asks bitterly. "To ask how he lived with that feeling. You made me ashamed of what I am."

My hand drops to the bed. "Damon, please-,"

He stands up and points a shaking finger at me. "I felt like I was _raping_ her, Elena, to take her blood. How can you say you love _me_ if you make me ashamed of who I am?"

I'm crying in earnest now, totally stricken by the damage I've done. I've never wanted to join the ranks of people who were incapable of accepting Damon, of loving him no matter what. I never thought it was possible that of all the ways I could hurt him, that this would be one of them.

And it isn't. I still love him. But he's right, I _can't_ accept all of him. I can't love that he murders, that he hurts people deliberately. As much as I worry that I would forsake that part of myself for him, I'm not capable of it. I won't be able to make myself leave him for it, but I also can't excise the part of me that hates it, hates that he wants to do that.

He goes to his closet and pulls on jeans over his nakedness. I can't take my eyes off him. The hands that touch me so softly are the ones that break necks, rend flesh from bone. The teeth that pierce my throat so sweetly can tear and butcher. How can all this contradiction exist within me? Within him?

He reaches up and grips the top edge of the doorframe into his closet, the muscles in his back rippling as he squeezes. I hear the wood groan and begin to crack under his fingers.

I'm curled into a ball on his bed in my underwear.

"Stop crying!" he finally growls, the words ripping up out of his chest with an animal sound. I catch my breath and try to swallow my sobs.

"I love you, Damon. I heard what you said, but I love you anyway."

He comes back to the bed slowly, those pants riding low on his hips, the cut of his abs stark above dark fabric.

He sits down next to me, his eyes sad and distant. "Do you?" He tucks a long strand of my hair behind my ear, like he always does. I'm blinking away tears so I can see him better.

"Then why are you crying?" he asks with brutal gentleness.

I don't have an answer.

His fingers brush my cheek. "I think you should go," he says, very softly.

* * *

_Author's Note: I hate to leave you on such a sad note, but I don't think there will be anybody around to read during Thanksgiving, so I'm going to wait to post the next chapter until after the holiday. Hit the button to follow author so you don't miss the next chapters. The making up is so much more fun than the fighting… I would LOVE to hear what you guys think of my interpretation of Damon and Elena's hopes and fears and what they can and can't live with. I took a lot of artistic license there. _


	3. New Moon

_Author's Note: The title of this chapter is from the Stephanie Meyer book, because of the plot similarities. But my dark period is 249 pages shorter._

* * *

**Chapter 3: New Moon**

* * *

_His fingers brush my cheek. "I think you should go," he says, very softly._

**ELENA POV**

When I go back to the boarding house a few hours later, Damon's gone as if he never existed. On my knees in the foyer of a home with no family, I think that I can't possibly live without him.

I'm right.

All my strength, everything I've learned and survived, all the seemingly endless resilience that I've grown into the last few years is nothing compared to the loss of him. Once he's gone, I don't cope. Sometimes I go through the motions of sleeping, showering, going to my college classes. Mostly I don't.

For three weeks, I try to find him with an obsession that will not allow me even an instant of rest. I don't find a single shred of a clue.

Jeremy threatens me until I start eating again. Granola bars, nothing else. Somehow my throat accepts those as a compromise between penance and survival.

Sometimes I think I can do something, that my body and mind can cooperate long enough to clean the living room or help Caroline make a poster for an event I will never remember the name of. But then I think of Damon out there somewhere, killing. Tearing people apart in his rage and betrayal and loneliness. Proving over and over again that I can't love him despite everything. That I didn't. Trying to prove to both of us that _that_ is who he is.

At those times, I end up crippled with sobbing, for the people that he's killing because of me. For him, because their deaths live in his head, in his soul now and I'll never be able to take them back.

A lot of times, to stop the tears, I have to stop existing. Eventually I wake back up to Bonnie or Jeremy, Caroline or Matt or Ric shaking me, shouting at me.

I'm never sure if I've been asleep or something else entirely. I can't really seem to care enough to figure it out.

On one of those days, Jeremy threatens to put me in an institution. He says I'm not living, I'm not functioning. That he doesn't know how to take care of me and that professionals might be able to help.

I just stare at him. I wonder if they can give me medications so I can stop existing forever, leave my brain in that netherland where it doesn't have to be connected to me, to my merciless memory.

Jeremy doesn't put me in an institution.

One thing helps, in that it gets me to expend the effort it takes to start going to class again. Ric threatens to call Stefan, to tell him what happened and ask him to help me.

"You aren't that cruel, Ric," I tell him listlessly. "You wouldn't do that to Stefan."

He stares me down.

The next day, I go to class. I put my body in a chair in each of the rooms I am supposed to be in, for the periods of time that I am supposed to be there.

Ric doesn't call Stefan.

It makes sense, after all this, that when I leave for school one day and Damon is on my doorstep, I think he's a hallucination.

I walk right by him, but then I stop, because why shouldn't I enjoy a hallucination? I have pictures of Damon, but they are nothing to the reality of him. Or this truly delightful figment of my imagination.

My mind has retained all the little details of him. The fine, almost feminine grain of his skin, the spatulate shape of his fingernails. I enjoy the 3-D projection of my memory. I wonder if I don't move, if it will stay.

He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. "You look like shit, Elena Gilbert."

Why the hell couldn't I have a nice hallucination? I frown. I suppose this is another new facet of my endless self-flagellation. Maybe I _should _call Stefan. We'd be great, wrist-slicing company for one another. I haven't spoken to him since Damon left. Last I checked he was a lot more stable than I am.

"Baby Gilbert isn't much of a keeper. Guess I'm not surprised. Most 17-year-old boys can't keep a goldfish alive, much less a sister. My buddy Ric, on the other hand…" Damon frowns. "Did kill his last goldfish, even though Jenna gave it to him. He was pissed about that. Shit. Poor choice of babysitters on my part," he says with studious offhandedness. This is how I know it is really him.

My hallucinations would be sweet, or harsh, but not sarcastic.

I make a totally illogical movement as I try to go forward to touch him and fall on my ass with surprise, all at the same time. He catches me, sets me back on my feet and releases me so fast I feel the air stir as he pulls back.

"Want to go inside and talk?" he offers. "Play a little Truth or Dare, have a pillow fight in our underwear?"

I have no idea how to respond to this.

"Actually, you probably want to eat a hot meal or twelve and sleep for a week." The artificial smile gives way to a deep frown. "You look like a vampire starved for blood for a bicentennial or so. What the hell, Elena?"

I don't want food. I want to breathe in Damon, a really sick, co-dependent kind of CPR. I'm disgusted with myself, but it's been too long for me to remember how to recover my personality enough to engage in a conversation with him.

He tilts his head and pouts mockingly at me. "Make up sex?" he tries hopefully.

That does it. Blood rushes to all my extremities, tingling in my fingers as my body flushes hot and then cold. I'm furious.

A real smile sparks in Damon's eyes and he holds out his arms. "There's my girl. Come over here."

I fly at him. I think I meant to embrace him, kiss him with that half-assaultive violence we had perfected for the times when we just couldn't contain all the passion between us in gentleness.

Instead I'm beating the shit out of him, pounding his chest and kicking him maliciously in the shins and even stomping his toes a few times through the thick leather of his motorcycle boots.

I'm shouting and yelling at him and cursing like crazy. He has his arms around my neck, holding me close so that I can't get a lot of force behind my blows and he's breathing in the scent of my hair, laughing with a sound that is so beautiful I want to stop my ears against it.

Jeremy bursts out the front door.

"Elena? What's wrong?"

He sees Damon and his voice is two octaves deep in the most serious kind of sincere when he says, "Thank _fucking_ God."

"Good to see you too, baby brother," Damon says, raising his hand for a casual two-finger wave at Jeremy before returning it to my hair.

I've seen him do it a thousand times. I punch him in the stomach for making me remember that. It hurts my hand. He hasn't exactly run to fat in his absence.

"Nice stake you have there, too. A good boy scout is always prepared."

Jeremy makes a little chuffing sound that's half a laugh, and I don't need to turn around to know he has a reluctant smile on his face. Jeremy always looked up to Damon even after Damon tried to kill him, for whatever reason.

He went through phases of thinking Damon was bad for me, but after we'd gotten together they'd settled into a kind of buddy-buddy thing with Damon sometimes playing big brother mockingly, but perfectly. How had I been too selfish to realize that Jeremy missed him too?

I hear the front door close as my brother gives us some privacy.

I slug Damon one more time in the ribs and then hug him crushingly. He kisses my forehead. "Miss me?"

I groan, sort of laugh-crying. I duck my head and swipe my eyes against my shoulder. I've done enough crying for the year.

"You're such an _ass_. How did I not remember that part?"

"So you were thinking about me?" he teases, but I know what is under that joking tone.

I pull back and glare at him. "Jeremy threatened to put me in a home. Several times. We really need to work on our arguing technique."

Damon steals a light kiss from my lips. He's acting playful, but I think he's worried that I wouldn't let him if he gave me a chance to refuse.

The front door slams again. "Going to school. Catch you guys later."

I pull back, slightly embarrassed. Jeremy turns with feigned casualness. I smile fondly, recognizing the movement.

"Hey Damon, you gonna be here for dinner tonight?"

"Sure. Unless Elena stakes me before then. Bury the body nice and deep, will you?"

"Sure thing," Jeremy says with that smirk that looks so sweet on his face.

"Hey Jer!" I call after him. I owe him about a million after the last six weeks. "Love you!"

"Love you too, 'Lena!" he calls, dropping into the seat of the second hand Jeep we bought him this year.

I turn back to Damon and scan him from head to toe. He looks uninjured, healthy.

"How do you look so good?" I ask him spitefully. I look and feel like a crack addict after a car accident.

He shrugs. "I'm a vampire. If I have enough blood, I'm healthy enough to do cologne commercials, no matter what else is going on."

I flinch at the word 'blood' and his eyes flicker in reaction.

He locks his hands behind his head and looks up at the ceiling of the porch. "Oh, wow. Let's do this part quick like a Band-aid, okay? Killed one person. Not exactly a Ripper body count, but probably not going to win me an award from the morality police. Pretty minimal compulsion." He gives an embarrassed scoff. "Weird, do-gooder compulsion once or twice too."

I watch the effort he has to exert to make himself meet my eyes. The smile cracks and falls off his face. "Elena."

With the artifice gone, the strain of the last six weeks shows on his face, not as hidden by the glow of healthy skin and teeth as I thought.

"Forgive me?"

I bite my tongue, my heart, my feet, to keep them away from him for just another minute. One more minute. I shouldn't forgive him after he just confessed to murder. I don't condone murder.

Unfortunately, the person who could ask him to leave based on that admission hadn't spent two years of her life around many different kinds of violent supernatural creatures. She had not spent the last six weeks trying to live without Damon.

"One condition?"

He is very afraid of what I'm going to say. I can see it on his body inside that familiar leather jacket.

"Keep your promise, Damon. Don't leave me again."

He steps close, eyes tentatively hopeful, reaching for me.

"You can yell and hate me and break things and be angry, but do it _here_, ok?" I catch his hands in midair and squeeze them, draping them around my neck because I'm not sure he actually has the confidence to do it. "I'm never going to be strong enough to do without you, not if I get to be as old as Klaus was."

"I never was," he whispers against my mouth before he kisses me.

**DAMON POV**

I'm kissing Elena again, and it feels like somebody just freed me from the rack.

I should know, because my memories of Klaus exercising me on that particular implement are still quite vivid. I remember perfectly the moment that Bonnie's spell broke the chains: that first rush of relief from tension, so vivid you can't quite trust your body or your mind or your luck just yet.

The roughness of Elena's tongue is just the same as I remember, but her lips are a little chapped and not as soft as they were. Her hand in my hair grips harder than she used to. I can't believe she's touching me. I never let myself believe she would ever want to again.

I should be a pro at lusting after Elena from afar, but after actually _having_ her love every day for a year, being apart made me wonder how much of Stefan's Ripper binge had anything at all to do with human blood.

I got way too used to making her laugh and giving Jeremy shit and having a real life for the first time since Katherine hijacked me into immortality.

I've managed to play it moderately cool up to this point but now I pick her up and bring her inside, not losing eye contact as I carry her upstairs to her bedroom.

"Say it again."

"Which part?" she asks me, her face giddy with relief.

"The part where you forgive me."

"The part where I don't have to forgive you because I love _you?_" she asks.

"That part," I say, but I don't let her talk because I have to kiss her.

I brushed my teeth before I came over, but my mouth feels sour and stained from six weeks of booze by the gallon and the blood of unhappy people. I hope she can't taste it on me.

Her hands are inside my shirt and I'm already worrying about how I'm going to make love to her without hurting her. Its times like these that I start to wish Elena was a vampire. My need for her isn't interested in her lack of durability.

When I left, I fully intended to fuck and suck my way through as many women as I wanted, let myself off the leash to be as bad as I wanted. After the first fifty years I was in love with supposedly-entombed Katherine, I wasn't exactly priestly. This time, though, I couldn't even bring myself to try to sleep with someone else.

I knew sex would make me think about Elena more, not less. And no matter how hot the girl, every thrust was going to be a comparison they'd never come out on the high end of. Too depressing to even try.

Six weeks without sex is enough to make any vampire edgy. Six weeks without sex with Elena makes my head want to explode out of sheer self-pity.

My shirt is gone already and Elena has one hand in my hair and her other on my chest, using her fingernails to pinch my nipple. I gasp with the sensation and lean forward to bite her lower lip, teasing it with my tongue. This is our dance, this chaotic mess of gentleness and ruthless passion.

Normally I take my time with Elena, because I love to watch her respond to my touch. I drink her pleasure like it is my own, and I could be more than happy giving her orgasms all day long. After her second, she gets so relaxed that it's a lot like getting her drunk.

Today I'm not sure I can go slow. It's a struggle even to be gentle enough not to hurt her because I need her close to me, need to imprint her body back onto mine.

I pull away, not sure we should do this right now.

She won't let me stop.

As soon as I retreat, she comes with me, biting the spot just behind my earlobe that she damn well knows makes me go primitive and dominant. She's curled into my chest, and wearing way too many clothes.

I run my hands up her back and pull her sweater off over her head. I just want to feel as much of her skin as I can. I inhale her scent, my urgency yielding for a moment as my lips touch her collarbone, her head falling back on a sigh.

She doesn't know, can't possibly know because she hasn't lived long enough. There are so many bodies in the world and none are magic like hers.

I rub my cheek against her stomach, touching her with my skin and tongue and teeth so I can feel her clench and move against me restlessly. My hands run up and down her arms ceaselessly, circling her tiny wrists, covering her hands, rubbing her palms with my thumbs.

Sometimes with her, I don't know what's sex and what is me just loving her, absorbing her into me every way I can think to do it. Because I've had sex every way that's been invented, and it didn't remind me at all of what goes on between Elena and me when we're alone.

I'm an idiot. We're both idiots, for thinking that there is any kill, any drug, _anything_ on this earth that feels better to me than she does.

I knew it would hurt me to leave. I just don't get how I didn't consider even once that it would hurt Elena, too.

She pulls my head up and kisses me once, then catches my eyes. "Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Worrying. Thinking." She takes my hand and puts it between her breasts, on the hard plate of bone that guards her heart from me.

"Do you feel that?"

"The success of our cardio regime?" I attempt.

"That's me, better. That's me, fixed. Perfect, now that you're here. I'm about five orgasms from nirvana, and you're slow on your game today, Salvatore."

I smirk at her, taking a piece of her hair and tickling her chin with it. "_Five_ orgasms? You're demanding."

"You're the sex god, not me," she protests, biting at my fingers. "Deal with it."

I let her catch one of my fingers and suck it into her mouth, her tongue wrapping around my digit with a particular mix of soft and hard textures that she's used on my cock dozens of times.

I hold her gaze so I can see exactly when she starts fantasizing about what else she can do with her naughty little tongue. When I see her eyes grow hazy, I bend to her lips without removing my finger, and kiss her, both our tongues swirling around my finger because I want to see what it feels like.

It feels fucking incredible.

I have to stop and get rid of her pants and boots, kneeling between her legs as I lift her ankle to my mouth, scraping my teeth over the thin skin and then kissing the inside of her knee. She whimpers, already squirming. I have to hold her onto the mattress with one hand while I play with her inner thighs. By the time I reach her panties, she's totally unable to keep still.

"Do you want me to stop?" I tease.

She shakes her head, her eyes glazed and vague.

"I need you to stop moving," I tell her. "Or I'll stop."

She doesn't, of course. And neither do I. I don't even tease her as much as I pet her, smoothing my hands over every scrap of her. I need to remember how she feels, how my world feels with her in it.

Her legs are stronger, as if she's been running. Her arms weaker, as if she gave up on lifting weights.

"It is a crime against humanity that you are wearing clothes right now, Damon," she tells me sternly.

"Pot, kettle, Elena. It's a crime against humanity that you ever wear clothes."

Still, I shift so she can reach the button on my jeans and try not to shout when her hand wraps around me.

She bends and kisses my stomach, her hair teasing my thighs. I concentrate on not ripping her sheets as my hands ball into fists and she pushes my erection into her mouth.

I last about three seconds before I have to pull her away, hauling her up and over my body, our mouths colliding, all pretense of patience gone. We nearly roll off the bed and I catch us and push us back with one leg. My hand is knotted in her hair and her fingernails are digging into my ass. My jeans are history.

"_Now_, Damon," she pants, biting my bottom lip. "We can go slow later."

I kiss her, my tongue owning her mouth one more time before I roll her over and pull her up on her hands and knees before me. She's already pushing her ass back against me. I have to hold her hips still with one hand, taking my painfully swollen dick in my fist to guide it into her.

She's slippery wet, but even so I don't slide in easily. I have to grit my teeth and roll my hips a little at a time, working it in. She's so tight, it has to hurt her a little. It's definitely been too long since we were together.

Elena makes a breathy little noise and pulls me down so I'm braced on my arms, my chest mirroring the curve of her back, my knees parting hers. She turns her head and bites my bicep as she strains against me.

I give in and thrust hard, forcing the last couple of inches. She gasps and reaches up, gripping the back of my neck, holding my cheek against hers.

She contracts, her inner walls embracing me in orgasm. I kneel over her, my body wrapped around hers, and I'm home. I'm finally home.

* * *

_Author's Note: Leave me a review and let me know what you think! But hang around- we have one more chapter and makeup sex does not solve everything. Though it does make hard conversations much more pleasant. _


	4. Angle of Repose

_Author's Note: For those who didn't read "Inevitable," Ric isn't dead in this particular universe. Which makes it all the nicer, in my opinion. The chapter title is a phrase describing the exact point at which debris stop tumbling down a steep slope and settle into place._

* * *

**ELENA POV**

Much later, we lie naked on our sides, drinking in the sight of each other. I feel like I'm years behind on seeing him, enjoying him.

Damon props himself up on an elbow and looks at me seriously. "I know you think this isn't over, but it actually kind of is."

My heart skips a beat. Does he mean us?

"The argument," he clarifies, tracing my lips with his thumb. "Don't look so worried."

Despite his reassurance, he takes a long look at my face before he starts to speak. As if he's trying to memorize the way I looked at him before I knew what he's about to tell me. I try to steel myself, but my stomach is freefalling.

"I went off the rails for sure, so Bonnie and Caroline and everybody else can enjoy a good decade or so of I-told-you-so on my tab," he says flatly. "Two hours after I left, I took a girl out of a bar across the state line and drained her in the woods nearby."

I don't flinch or even blink at his words, but my heart breaks. For her. For him. For me. I watch his eyes go dark and wonder how I should handle this.

I scoot closer and push him onto his back so I can lay my head on his chest. He touches my hair tentatively at first, but when I don't pull away he starts combing his fingers through it, spreading it methodically out until it covers his whole chest. He used to do this all the time, but when I asked him why he liked it, he just smiled and shook his head.

Now, I wish Damon had enough hair that I could hide in it.

"I drained her to the last drop. You probably don't want to hear that, but it's kind of important. You probably don't want to hear this either, but killing as a vampire is different. Unlike Stefan, I tried it both ways. As a human during the war, and later, as a predator. Totally different dynamic. As a vampire, you're built to kill. It feels good in the way that eating when you're hungry feels good. Like sex feels good when it's really been a while. There's this…rush of adrenaline when their heartbeat starts to slow."

In the quiet, I wait to hear the rest. His fingers feel good in my hair, even though I should hate them for what they've done.

"You don't have to hear this," he says. "I could summarize."

"I know. I want to understand," I say without lifting my head. I shouldn't be here. If I was good, I wouldn't be here. My stomach is on fire for that girl in the woods, but my heart is beating slow and peaceful and I don't have the willpower to even consider leaving this room.

"It feels like a turning point. I don't know if you've ever had a religious experience, but it is sort of like that. Sort of like falling in love. The whole world holds its breath for a moment and waits for you. Waits to hear _your_ verdict. Everything that person is, everything they've done, everything they might do if you let them live. All their possibilities. It's your choice. It is ultimate power. You decide whether the world will be a generous place today, or not."

I wonder how this can make sense to me. Surely my brain would reject as illogical an argument this evil. I can't imagine being so selfish as to think I had power like that. But I think I can see how it would be addictive.

"I think the reason I started to like it is that my world was devoid of mercy and I began to exult in it, in a weird, contrary way." He makes an irritated sound. "I don't know. A shrink could probably play with this shit for decades."

He pauses, smoothing my hair across his chest. "After I'd known you for a while and you had started to get to me, I killed a girl. Her name was Jessica. I was getting addicted to the feeling of you being proud of me, to the look in your eye when you thought you saw some new clue that I was a good guy," he says, sarcasm touching his voice.

"I killed that girl to prove that you didn't have total power over me. It wasn't that long after I found out Katherine was a perfidious bitch, and I was done handing my balls over to girls."

"That's a nice way to talk about loving somebody," I can't resist saying.

"Yeah, well, sometimes that's what it feels like. At that point, my road rash from getting thrown under the bus by you and Katherine went all the way to the bone. What I'm saying is that when I killed that girl to prove a point to myself, I still liked the rush. And after that, I just didn't feel like killing anybody for a while, except in a fair fight, which we had plenty of. I had proven to myself that I could kill if I wanted to and it had nothing to do with you, so it was cool. I didn't realize it when we had our latest fight but that was my last real murder."

"So what happened with the girl in the woods, across the state line?" I'm masochistic, maybe, but I want to get this over with. If there's some oasis in this wreckage of morality and sin where we can come to rest together, I want to find it, and I want to find it soon.

"Same thing, Elena. I probably need to grow up a little bit, for as old as I am. I just wanted to throw it in your face that you couldn't control me, that I was evil and foul and you were right to hate me for it, so it didn't matter. That I _didn't_ care."

"But you do."

"Don't be smug," he says. "It's not attractive."

I smile that he can tease me in the midst of this. Maybe we can be okay. Maybe somehow.

"This last girl wasn't fun. I cursed your name in two or three different languages for fucking my head all up and taking the savor out of killing. Yadda, yadda, angst, black nail polish, blew a speaker in my Camaro, realized that in the tradition of great whiney breakups everywhere it wasn't you, it was me."

I turn my head over to look at him.

"Elena, you're messing up my work here," he complains, going back to blanketing himself in my hair. I smile. So it's a comfort thing. I'm good with that. I'm never cutting my hair.

"So you don't like killing anymore," I say, a little afraid to hope.

"Apparently not. Although I purely love a good fight, so don't think I'm going to join the Monk on top of a mountain anytime soon."

"No, I didn't think so," I say, smiling up at him.

He looks away. "Don't do that."

"What?"

"Look at me like that. I didn't do it for you. Just happened. You know, one day what turns you on is just like old dishwater the next."

"I've never noticed you losing interest in any of your sexual kinks," I point out with a hint of a smile.

"Don't distract me, woman," he warns. "This is the last time this century you're going to get me to talk about my _feelings_, so enjoy it. I'm only doing it now so we clearly do not _ever_ have to repeat the fight we just had."

"In that case, go ahead. By all means." Whatever else he has to say can't be that bad. He said he only killed one person. Only one. After the killing spree I'd been imagining for the last six weeks, it seemed like nothing short of a miracle.

"So, I spent some time figuring out how I felt about live feeding. That took longer than it should have because I was pissed about you averse-conditioning me to it with your whole rape-talk thing."

"I love it when you talk behavioralism to me," I tease. I'm being way lighter about this than I should, but God, the _relief_ of the idea that this might be in the past is making me feel a little buzzed.

"Quiet. I'm talking about being mad at you right now," he says with unconvincing irritation. "You had a point about that, too. It was taking away those girls' choice. Even though that made the feeding more pleasant for them, they didn't exactly sign a Red Cross waiver for me. That didn't used to bother me. Now…" he shrugs diffidently. "My other option was to spend some time seducing a girl until she fell in love with me enough to offer me her blood. I've done that a lot in the past." He glances at me. "Kind of off the table now."

"So now what?"

"So I got drunk. A lot. With Ric in Atlanta one night actually. Did he tell you about that?"

"No!" I'm annoyed. "He could have at least told me you were ok."

"Yeah, not really sure he would have drawn that conclusion from the evidence at hand. Also, I was kinda cranky, so I should give him credit for not repeating things. He tried to beat a little wisdom into my head, but I pretty much washed it in one ear and out the other with whiskey. More loud music, more angst, more bourbon, and I landed at a Goth club outside of New Orleans."

"You've been busy. I've done…pretty much nothing since you've been gone."

"I'm not sure you can count trying to make your blood 80-proof as doing something, Elena," he says dryly. "Anyway, in New Orleans, they actually like our kind. Been a hotspot for a long, long time. I was a little bit of a hit in the local nightlife circuit, and I discovered something else."

"Please don't say Ecstasy."

"Very funny. The last thing I needed at that point was a boner that wouldn't die." He grins. "Does that count as an undead boner?"

I roll my eyes. "You know, I missed you a lot, but not enough to think you're funny."

I'm feeling a lot better, except that the darkest corner of my mind is making its feelings known again. I don't want to hear them, I don't want to think about them, and I sure as heck do not want to discuss them with Damon. Today or ever.

Unfortunately, I am a bad actress.

"What?" Damon asks.

"Nothing. Just waiting to hear about New Orleans."

He narrows his eyes at me. "Seriously. You just thought of something. I can tell. I did _not_ take Ecstasy- oh." He relaxes his head back into my pillow and grins. "Jealous?"

I relax too. He wouldn't joke if there was anything to worry about.

"No, I didn't sleep with anybody, _Elena,_" he says, drawing my name out sarcastically like he used to when we were "just friends" and half-flirting half-fighting _all _of the time. "I go strictly top-shelf these days."

I frown at him and bite his abs, just to be difficult. "I'm not a drink."

"Sometimes you are," he says, wiggling his eyebrows. Then he drops it. "In poor taste. Stop distracting me, you're making my jokes worse."

"You don't need help for that. No, tell me about New Orleans. I wasn't worried, by the way. It was just a passing thought."

"Sure you were worried." He gestures to himself, smirking. "This body, in New Orleans? Trouble for sure."

I poke him in the side. I don't have the energy for a punch after the sex we had earlier. "New Orleans." I remind him.

"Actually there's not that much to say about it. There are a lot of people who _want_ to feed a vampire. It's kind of a fetish scene, actually. So, compulsion free, except that I did compel them not to tell anyone about it, which seemed intelligent. Not as safe, because you can find your way around that command if you still have the memory, but people like that say they see vampires ten times a day. So nobody listens. Kind of a great loophole, all around."

I think this over, stroking his shoulder and arm.

"You ok?"

I look back up to his face. "Yeah," I say automatically, then consider. "No, I really am. Why?"

"This is a lot to take in. I guess there's not much left that can shock you with the vampire stuff, but still."

"Did you like it? With the Goths, or whatever?"

"Not as much as I like drinking from you. But I need more than I can take from you and if you become a vampire, then I'm back 100% on the vacuum-sealed diet. That gets as old as TV dinners after a while." He looks up at the ceiling, tucking his free hand back behind his head again.

"The Goths are a weird bunch. I kind of like how crazy they all are. Some of them care way too much about what other people think and some of them don't care at all. A lot of them are more messed up than I am."

"So is that some kind of permanent solution?"

"It'd be nice to find the subculture closer by. I bet I could if I wanted. If I looked hard, I could probably even find one without pancake makeup and with a healthier diet than cigarettes and martinis."

"You mean somebody you'd want to drink from." I frown. "I guess I never thought you had much in the way of criteria for that except that you obviously like pretty girls."

"You can kind of taste people's habits in their blood. If I'm going for some conscience-free feeding, I'd rather nab somebody without so many issues. Some of those Goth kids have enough baggage to have Stefan calling for the bellhop."

I choke back a laugh and frown at him. "That's mean, Damon."

"Yeah, but funny," he says unrepentantly.

"So that was your do-gooder compulsion?"

He winces. "I was hoping you forgot that slip."

"As if I'd miss an opportunity to torment you with fresh evidence of your better nature," I tease.

"Yeah, imagine," he says with heavy sarcasm.

"So what did you do?"

"None of your business," he tells me, touching the end of my nose. "You hungry?"

"Yeah," I realize. It's an unfamiliar feeling, now. "Starved."

"Want me to cook something?" he asks in a casual way that makes me think he really wants to.

"Are you kidding? It's my cooking or Jeremy's since you left," I say, avoiding the fact that I haven't eaten anything that didn't come out of a Quaker Oats box in six weeks. Instead, I kiss his stomach one more time and roll to my feet to head for the shower.

"You're looking kinda thin," he says, a shadow crossing his face.

"Teenage culinary skills diet. Think I can market that?"

"Elena?"

His tone isn't playful and my stomach drops a little. Maybe we're not done with confession time.

I pause in the bathroom door. "Hmmm?"

"About a month after I left, Stefan called to accuse me of forbidding you to talk to him. I told him to untwist his panties but I was a little curious."

"About what?"

He's back to studying my ceiling. I ought to have Jeremy paint a mural up there for him, if he's going to spend so much time avoiding my eyes by staring at it.

"When he left, you didn't have any problem hanging out with me. And you didn't-," he breaks off and glances warily at me.

"I didn't what, Damon?" I ask, going back to him and sitting on the edge of the bed. I think we're both going to need a lot of reassurance to settle back into our normal rhythm after this fight. We've always fought big and loud and flaming hot, but this was a new record even for us.

"Look so different," he whispers, touching the sunken, dark area under my eye.

I know I've lost a lot of weight I didn't have to lose, because everybody's mentioned it. Nightmares kept me awake most nights, too, so sleep hasn't been going great. Still, the worst thing about the last six weeks was how I felt like somebody had bled my personality out through my ears. It was like my skin was a dress draped over a mannequin, held up by a thin layer of plastic with nothing inside.

And I can smile at him now because that was so easy to fix. Damon walked onto my porch and said "Make-up sex?" And the anger burned me straight back to life.

I'd rather not have my happiness totally depend on someone else being nearby. But I know better than to think I'm capable of keeping people at enough of a distance that they don't have the power to hurt me. I'm not that girl, and I don't want to be.

I capture Damon's hand. "I'm fine now. Though I think you're going to have to be pretty careful not to get yourself killed. I mean, I knew you were okay when you were gone this time, and I even thought it was pretty likely that you'd come back eventually, but I was kind of a mess. I'm going to have to take better care of you in the future. Keep you around a while."

"I'm the one who needs to take better care of you," he says, covering my ribs with his hands as if he can press the flesh back onto them. "I just don't understand why you didn't call Stefan."

My head snaps back in surprise. "What? Why would I do that?"

"For company. I'm not saying that you'd un-choose me-," his eyes _are_ saying that. They're saying it loud. "But you care about him, he's your friend and he would have helped you."

"Yeah, and it would have led him on and distracted him from his new path of trying to find moderation and he wouldn't have been able to resist pointing out every wrong thing you've ever done. Damon, I didn't need him. I needed _you."_

His voice is low, his jaw so tight that I can't make out the words in what he says next.

"Non-vampire hearing, Damon. You've gotta give me some volume, honey," I tell him playfully. There's no reason for him to be so serious. He's back. He doesn't _want_ to kill people anymore. Everything is going to be fine.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I hurt you, that you had to go through all this just because you cared about me." He voice carries an echo of awe, of confusion.

I go completely still because Damon has never, never apologized to me, or anybody. He'll say things to make me realize he's sorry but he never _says_ it.

"Wow, you really did change while you were gone," I say, unable to hide my surprise.

I blink and try to recover, because that was kind of tactless. "I wouldn't take it back, Damon. I knew what I felt for you was too strong to be convenient, that it would be hard to make that kind of passion fit into daily life." I touch his cheek with a flirty smile. "But you make it worth it, believe me."

It hurts my heart that he has such a hard time believing how much I care about him, even after all this time. He usually buries it under three or four layers of arrogance, but we're both raw today.

I stretch out next to him again, pressing my face against his neck, holding my hand against his heart.

"Andie was right," he murmurs.

"About what?" I ask. He never talks about Andie, either, though I think he and Stefan might be even on the Lexie scorecard after that terrible mess. Stefan killed her on my birthday. I shiver, thinking about it.

"She said love changes you. I kinda thought she meant by being whipped. But she was right. It makes everything different. Every little thing."

"Of course it does." I lift my head and smile teasingly at him "As if you haven't noticed all the ways you've changed me?"

He matches my smile. "You mean other than making you sexually insatiable?"

"Oh, I'm satiable, alright. But only by you." I kiss him briefly. "I shouldn't encourage your towering ego, I know, but it's true. I was talking about other stuff, though. Like how you taught me that it's okay even in the midst of something really serious to make jokes, that it doesn't mean you don't care about what's going on. You reminded me how to have fun again, be spontaneous."

I trace his lips with my finger and he watches my face, fascinated but a little dubious of what I'm saying.

"You taught me that even though self-control is important sometimes, at other times it's just as important to let go and do what you really feel." I let my hand wander down his chest, teasing his inner thigh. His muscles tighten in my wake and I smile with the knowledge of my power over his body.

"It's ironic, because you taught me not to just strive for who I wanted to be, but also accept who I am right now."

"Yes, and I think we were all disappointed to find that your true self liked Dancing with the Stars," he says dryly. "But why is that ironic?"

I straddle him and lean down for a kiss. It only takes a second for the pressure of our lips together to ignite into something unbearably hot. It only ever takes a second and I _love_ that. I take his wrists and pin them over his head, deepening the kiss until we're both breathless and his hips are pushing up against me and he pulls his hands free again so he can touch me.

"Because you accept who you are, but you still don't understand how I can love that, love you." I nip his lower lip. "Trust me, it isn't difficult."

His hips rising beneath me are all raw sex and a power I intend to make full use of in a moment, but his hands are very gentle on the thin skin over my hipbones.

"Fortunately, I have plenty of time to spend convincing you," I whisper against his mouth, pulling back just enough that I can enjoy his ice-blue eyes. They're already molten with want, but still tinged with his uncertainty, and full of love for me, always. They're Damon. They are, he is, what I can't live without. What shocks my life into Technicolor instead of plain black and white. If it takes me every day of my life to make him understand how much I love him… Well, then it'll be a great life.

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks so much for reading and reviewing- I hope you enjoyed the story! If you want more Delena, try out my new fic, "Desperate Love," about how Damon and Elena navigate their new relationship, Elena's new vampire status, and her little brother's new vampire hunter status. Lots of action, lots of romance, just the way I like it!_


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